Abstract
BACKGROUND: Postnatal care (PNC) is recommended as a means of preventing maternal mortality during the postpartum period, but many women in low- and middle-income countries do not access care during this period. OBJECTIVE: We set out to examine sociocultural preferences that have been portrayed as barriers to care. DESIGN: We designed a qualitative study using the Health Equity Implementation Framework (HEIF). METHODS: We performed an abductive analysis of 63 semi-structured interviews with women who had recently given birth in three regions of Ethiopia using the HEIF and an inductive-deductive codebook to understand why women in Ethiopia do not use recommended PNC. RESULTS: We found that, in many cases, health providers do not consider women's cultural safety a primary need, but rather as a barrier to care. However, women's perceived refusal to participate in postnatal visits was, for many, an expression of agency and assertion of their needs for cultural safety. CONCLUSION: We propose adding cultural safety to HEIF as a process outcome so that implementers consider cultural needs in a dynamic manner that does not ask patients to choose between meeting their cultural needs and receiving necessary health care during the postnatal period.